Given Metro Vancouver’s sizable Iranian community and the large number of basketball fans, you just might find that intriguing combination among the audience as The Iran Job continues its Canadian debut Tuesday at the Vancouver International Film Festival.

The 93-minute documentary follows affable American basketball player Kevin Sheppard as he signs with the newest team in the Iranian Super League, A.S. Shiraz, and is charged with bringing the fledgling team into the playoffs.

As Sheppard explains in the film, “God put something in my spirit” that made him go to the far off land.

This might have turned out to be just a jock flick except that Sheppard’s engaging personality leads him to befriend three single Iranian women. The plot thickens when athletics becomes the backdrop to issues of women’s rights and freedoms, or lack thereof, in the strict Muslim country.

Together, the women visit the apartment Sheppard shares with his seven-foot Serbian teammate even though it’s taboo for Iranian women to go to any man’s home unless he is family. They take off head scarves and one even accepts a beer, both no-nos. Here, in this clandestine setting, the women engage in lively discussion about feeling repressed in their country and the film becomes gently, almost accidentally political.

Yet The Iran Job presents a favourable view of Iranian society, if not the country’s governing forces, and is alternately funny and poignant. Through German filmmaker Till Schauder’s lens, we get a glimpse into rarely seen corners of Iranian society, perhaps aided by his American-Iranian wife and producer Sara Nodjoumi.

In a phone interview from New York, where the film is set to open Oct. 12, Sheppard and Schauder described their initial trepidation about the project.

“We started with nothing, my wife and I,” said Schauder. “We had a studio apartment in Manhattan. We had literally no funding, nothing.” Adding to the financial pressure, they had two babies while the film was in the works.

Then there was Sheppard’s reluctance to move beyond basketball and share his private life, to allow Schauder who was initially a stranger, to sleep on his couch and record his every move.

“He was very annoying at first,” said Sheppard, explaining he is not normally a shy person in front of the camera. Having been a basketball player for hire around the world, he is used to entertaining people and being in the limelight. But this was too much. “I kicked him out a couple of times because he literally would not stop rolling his camera. I’d wake up at 5 a.m. Or I’d go pee at three in the morning. I was coming out of the bathroom and he is right in my face.”

Eventually Sheppard got so used to having Schauder and his camera around that they basically became invisible. All he had to do was be himself, a task he did not find difficult.

Once the film was made, there were other anxieties. A born procrastinator by his own admission, it took Sheppard two years to sign the release form which allowed the film to be shown publicly.

“I have to admit I didn’t show him the footage for a long time because I was so scared of his reaction,” said Schauder, whose wife pressured him to get Sheppard’s approval. When the filmmaker brought Sheppard to New York to do some sound recording and show him a rough cut, the basketball player loved the result and signed the form. “So my wife and I are still happily married,” said Schauder with a laugh.

Then there were the women. Although Shauder had permission to film them, he felt compelled to show the women the result because of potential repercussions.

He travelled to the United Kingdom with to show the film to Hilda, a nurse who befriends Sheppard in Iran and introduces him to her two friends after he is treated for a sprained ankle at the physical therapy office where she works. Being the most cautious of the three, Schauder half expected her to veto her involvement in the film.

“It was really the longest 93 minutes of my life,” he said. “She had every emotional reaction you can imagine. She laughed. She cried. She was nostalgic.” When it was over, Hilda gave her approval, saying she didn’t know what would happen as a result but she was very proud of the film.

Laleh, who had also moved to another country, requested several changes. But just as Schauder was instructing the film’s editors to make the changes, she called to say she had watched it again and changed her mind. “It’s beautiful as it is,” she told him. “Just leave it.”

The third woman, Elaheh, an Iranian beauty who dreamed of being a movie star, is the only one still living in Iran. She was also shown the film and, according to Schauder, raised no objections.

The Iran Job has never been formally shown in Iran, although it is possible bootlegged copies have made it into the country. As far as Schauder knows, the three women have not been penalized for their participation and he doubts they will be. Oppressive regimes tend to target a film’s makers rather than those who appear in it, he said.

Case in point: Schauder and Nodjoumi have been barred from re-entering Iran.

Despite the challenges in making the film, Schauder and Sheppard said they wouldn’t change a thing.

Sheppard feels he has done his part in changing the commonly held perception that Iran is a country full of terrorists.

His time in Iran and making the film have broadened his understanding of the world. Now the athlete is trying to take the lessons he learned and apply them back home on the island of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands where he has started the Choices Basketball Association for struggling young men.

For his part, Schauder admits he had no track record in documentary-making when he took on The Iran Job as his first non-fiction project. He has made some strategic mistakes in getting the film out to the public, he said, but he’s also had some wins.

“We were very lucky with some people helping us out and not so lucky with others,” he said.

The film has received positive reviews by the Los Angeles Times among others. The Huffington Post encouraged readers to view The Iran Job as a measured response to the anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims.

A Kickstarter campaign has been started to help widen theatrical distribution.

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